Rest in Pieces
by brosexual
Summary: 'And then you're standing over him, staring down at the body you don't want to believe is his, and you're absolutely certain that bones do not work that way.'


**so this is choppy and confusing but whatever i needed to write something sad-ish. set in an au sorta, i mean youll find out in a second. bro's pov.**

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><p>He hadn't made a single sound.<p>

No scream or shout or cry, no snarl or growl or protest, not even a gasp or a choke.

The only noise had been the soft 'shluck' of metal against skin, a sickening splat of liquid raining down, and then a dull thud of a body hitting the ground.

It made you wish you had been deaf. Anything would have been better than hearing that, considering what they added up to.

But you aren't deaf and you heard those sounds, and you know you'll be waking up in the middle of the night (assuming you ever get to sleep in the first place) with them ringing in your ears, plaguing your mind.

A scream would have better.

You can't do anything really, can't will yourself to move or speak or anything, all you can do is stare. Stare and not think, stare and not do, because what the fuck are you _supposed _to do in this kind of situation? Finding your little brother's (son really, but fuck genetics, he was always your bro) dead body was never in the book, no one ever told you, 'oh this is what to do when your kid dies in front of you'.

Against your will, because you don't want to have to deal with this, you want to turn tail and flee like the coward you are, your feet propel you forward, the traitorous things. You're moving but not really seeing or knowing, just going through the motions that bring you closer to him.

And then you're standing over him, staring down at the body you don't want to believe is his, and you're absolutely certain that bones _do not _work that way.

A second and a blink later, you find yourself on the ground with your knees hurting from the sudden impact, but you can't really focus on that either, because you had landed in a puddle and made the liquid splash up around you, coating everything in red.

It's soaking your jeans and covering your shoes and painting your hands, your treasured gloves, and you don't even care about any of that so much as that you got blood on your brother, it splattered across his snowy face and neck and shirt, staining the only pure thing you ever had in your life. You got his own blood on him and he couldn't even wipe it away because he was _dead, _dead and covered in his own life and looking so terribly mangled and broken.

You watch as your own hands set to work, trying to make his neck look normal and pulling up his shirt to hide the hideously red slit running across it. Your thumbs wipe at the dried blood streaming from his lips, smooth over the gashes on his forehead, clean off the fresh, wet blood you just coated him in.

Combing your fingers through his hair, untangling it and sending it back to the soft, pale glory it once reined; you ease out the matted mixture of red and brown.

And the entire time you tend to him, you cannot tear your eyes from his. The magnificently, bright red, freak eyes that were so much like yours except for the slight variation of color, now dull and pale and sightless and utterly _dead._

You reluctantly slide them shut, because they were the only thing left that tied you to him, and then you slip his broken shades onto his face and it's even worse, because his eyes were the only thing that had been restraining you.

Because there was no way your little bro was _ever_ going to see his cool as hell, ninjaesque, emotionless, BAMF of a brother break down, he was _never _going to see you cry. No matter how alive or otherwise.

Except now he couldn't see, his eyes were shut and gone, and he never _would _see, never would see his body or his blood or your tears.

And so there was nothing stopping the damn things, the weakness, from running down your face, down onto his, riveting across his cheeks and you might as well had been crying together, except ha, that was a funny thought, because he was _dead, _and the dead don't cry.

They don't cry or eat microwave pizza or bite back witty remarks or strife on the rooftops of shitty apartments with even shittier swords or wait up for you after late night gigs or cuddle up with you when it's dark and you're supposedly asleep and not aware or anything other than lay there and look dead, because that's exactly what they are, they're _dead._

Which means realistically, you're kneeling there next to his corpse and you're crying alone, he isn't there with you, he isn't now and he won't be later, he never will be and now is a good a time as any to get used to that.

You don't want to get used to that. Not now and not ever. You absolutely do _not _want to get used to the fact that your brother is dead, gone, do _not _want to get used to the fact that now you have your entire apartment to yourself and Lil' Cal and the rest of your smuppets, which you admittedly just kept around to creep Dave out. Don't want to get used to the fact that now you have no reason to keep them, because you honestly never even liked them yourself.

You don't want to get used to any of that. Especially not when it was your fault. Maybe not directly, but you had still been there, been there to see him get beaten down and then run through with his own goddamn sword, been there to have enough time to get to him, to save him.

You don't know why you didn't.

Fuck, maybe you wanted to see how he would have handled himself, because deep down you knew he would have come out victorious, because those were two of the main rules in the Book of Strider Law.

Rule Number Two: Striders Do Not Lose.

Rule Number One: Striders Do Not Die.

Except then he went and fucked those rules right the fuck up, because he both lost and died in the same match, didn't even have time to redeem himself.

God, the kid was such a failure.

Then again, _you _raised him. And you wouldn't even believe that he was a failure for a second.

So really, he was just as much a failure as you.

Maybe, if you had spent more time with him, trained him harder, taught him better, this wouldn't have happened. Maybe if you had actually hugged the kid for once, showed him you _did _actually give a damn, if you had given him something to fight for, it wouldn't have turned out this way.

In the end though, it really didn't matter. He was still dead and there was still nothing you could do about that, no matter how much you wished there were. You weren't him; you hadn't been blessed as a godsend by some game that fucked everything up anyway. Neither he nor his time abilities, to whatever extent, were descended unto you, they were utterly gone.

There was no fixing this fuck up.


End file.
